


how am I gonna be an optimist about this?

by thethirdphiladelphiavireo



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:22:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25423834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thethirdphiladelphiavireo/pseuds/thethirdphiladelphiavireo
Summary: It turns out, Adora can't leave for a space road trip. She needs Etheria, and Etheria needs her.And, apparently, when Adora suffers, the planet suffers too.
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra)
Comments: 37
Kudos: 293





	how am I gonna be an optimist about this?

Adora doesn’t get to leave for a “space road trip” after all.

She tries, a few months after the dust is settled. Prime is long gone—at least it feels that way. Etheria is bursting with life and magic. She’s trod its fresh, tall grass; she’s scaled the blooming towers of the Fright Zone; she’s wound through the ancient, gnarled trees of the Whispering Woods chasing the little bubbles of light that fill the air. It’s time to explore something new.

It really is as simple as that. One morning, she, Glimmer, Bow, Catra, and Entrapta all gather at the mouth of Mara’s ship, ready to enter that Leviathan once more to voyage the stars that are now within their reach. They wave goodbye to their friends—the rest of the princesses, too busy rebuilding their own kingdoms to come along; Bow’s dads, who are eagerly awaiting updates from their son’s voyage; Micah, who has temporarily retaken the throne to oversee Bright Moon in his daughter’s absence.

The five of them enter the hull. Bow takes the pilot’s seat while Entrapta sits at the dashboard, pressing buttons and reverently gliding her hands over the First One’s technology.

Darla says something. Blue lights flash in approval.

The ship takes off.

Through the windows, Adora can watch as they slowly lift off from Etheria’s surface. Her friends’ faces get smaller and smaller. The sprawling green fields beneath sway in the wind, ruffled by a sudden, strong breeze. She can just barely make out long, thick, individual stems at this height—each one looks like it’s straining towards the sky, grasping at the ship’s metal plating

The ship inches higher and higher. Adora leans against one of the walls. Catra joins her.

“Can’t believe I’m gonna be stuck with you all for who knows how long,” Catra mutters. The upward curve of her lips and the gleam of excitement in her eyes betray her, though.

“You love us,” Adora responds.

“Do not.”

“You love me.”

The two of them share a small smile. Catra offers her hand. Adora takes it, deftly intertwining their fingers and reveling in the soft warmth of Catra’s palm against hers. It’s the purest, littlest pleasure in the world, and Adora wouldn’t trade it for anything—not after being deprived of it for so long.

So why, when her chest feels so full and her head so light, does her stomach suddenly feel like it’s got a pit in it?

Adora swallows and turns to press her forehead against a window, hoping the touch of the cool glass will help with the sudden hot flush of her face. It doesn’t. She gazes through it at the layer of clouds hanging over Etheria, and feels a terrible, twisting roil in her guts. She quickly squeezes her eyes shut.

“Adora?” Catra’s worried voice cuts through her sudden dizziness.

“Yeah?”

“You okay?”

“Just a little airsick.” Adora raises a hand to her stomach, patting at it. She forces her eyes open and smiles at Catra. “Should be fine in a few minutes.”

Catra’s eyes search her face. Her tail emerges from behind her and comes up to stroke Adora’s arm. Normally, Adora would’ve found it cute; now, the point of contact sends a pulse of crackling, overbearing heat through her body. Another wave of nausea crashes over her. Catra must see it in her face—the tail is quickly withdrawn. Catra frowns at her.

The ship gets farther and farther from Etheria. Adora clenches her fists at her sides, desperately trying to muscle her way through the… whatever is happening to her. She breathes evenly, in and out.

The ship leaves Etheria’s atmosphere. Adora collapses.

…

The next thing she knows, she’s half-awake in a brightly lit room filled with voices and the hum of machinery. She blinks and tries to make sense of the blurry shapes and dampened, echoey sounds around her. Is that Entrapta’s voice? That shifting blob of pink sure looks like Entrapta. Adora relaxes a little. If Entrapta’s here, that probably means she’s safe. She feels warm and weightless. Before she knows it, she’s drifting off again.

When Adora wakes up next, it’s not to good news. Entrapta explains it to her, with Hordak’s help. Adora doesn’t understand the nitty-gritty of it, but things start to come together for her when they unfurl a helpful diagram with the failsafe’s symbol on it.

Adora had accepted the failsafe. She’d become the willing conduit for Etheria’s magic, for its lifeblood.

Now, she and the planet were inextricably intertwined. She could never leave it—her own essence was chained to Etheria.

It takes six months for the ship to leave Etheria again. Most of it is spent arguing. Adora urges Glimmer to go. Their world needs a representative on the universal stage now that Prime has fallen from power—who knows what the politics of his former conquests look like now? Glimmer refuses for a long time. She’d already left her best friends behind to pursue her own goals once, and she doesn’t want to be separated from any of them again. Adora assures her it’s not the same, she encourages Bow to go along too, and, one day, Glimmer agrees.

Adora doesn’t say anything to Catra about leaving or staying. The night Glimmer finally sets a date for her and Bow’s departure, she crawls into bed without even looking at Catra, afraid that just her gaze will keep Catra from making the choice that’s best for her.

“Hey,” Catra says, her voice rough and tired. She puts her hand on Adora’s shoulder and pulls, pulls until Adora finally rolls over and faces her.

The two of them look at each other, wordlessly searching the other’s expressions for a few moments, until Catra slowly loops her arms around Adora’s torso and presses Adora to her chest. She nuzzles her face into the crook of Adora’s neck and breathes deeply, in and out. The sound soothes Adora, calms the primal part of her brain that craves rest and warmth and safety.

“I don’t want to leave you,” Catra says. “Not again.”

“I know.” Adora blinks—her eyes are burning.

Catra slips one of her hands under the fabric of Adora’s night shirt. She skates her long claws up and down her back, applying just the slightest hint of pressure. Adora shivers and buries her face in Catra’s short hair.

“Glimmer wants you to go.”

It’s not phrased as a question. After all, it makes sense Glimmer would want Catra with her. They’ve become very close since their time together on Prime’s ship, and Catra has a surprisingly natural way with people, now that the war is over and it’s time for peace. And she’s smarter than she has any right to be, Adora’s known that forever. If there’s anyone Glimmer should want by her side up there, it’s Catra.

Catra nods. She sheathes her claws and uses the pad of her thumb to rub circles into Adora’s bare skin.

“You should go.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

…

The next day, Catra tells Glimmer she’ll be joining her on her mission, and she and Adora have a picnic.

The concept of a “picnic,” not too long ago, had been entirely foreign to the two former soldiers. Glimmer and Bow had taken them on one after the fall of Prime, and now that Catra’s leaving soon, Adora wants to do something nice—just the two of them.

They don’t go far or anything, just to a nice, shady corner of Bright Moon’s gardens. They talk and laugh and eat food that they’d nabbed from the kitchens. It’s ridiculously sappy, the way they’re acting—normally Catra would blush and call it gross. But she doesn’t have the energy for pretense. Not when they’re making the most of their remaining time together before her departure.

Adora feeds her a piece of cheese, and Catra leans forward and captures her lips in a soft kiss. She brings her hands up to cup Adora’s jaw lightly, and when she finally pulls away, the two of them gape in surprise at the surrounding plants. They’re glowing—all of them—with a faint, warm light.

Adora blushes. “I think—I think I’m doing that.”

“Wow,” Catra says, and grasps Adora’s hands in hers. “Entrapta wasn’t kidding.”

…

Glimmer, Entrapta, and the rest leave about a week later. Adora’s there to wave the ship goodbye, to watch it climb higher and higher in the sky, until it disappears entirely.

…

For a while, it’s not so bad.

Okay, that’s a lie. It’s terrible.

Getting used to sleeping without Catra had been hard enough the first time, back when she and Catra had still been too scared to really touch each other and Catra slept at her feet.

Trying to sleep without Catra now? Now that she’s used to gentle caresses and soft kisses at bedtime? To the whispered sweet nothings that are reserved for their bed, sometimes too honest and raw for the light of day?

It’s torture.

Melog curls up at her feet every night, meowing at her reassuringly, but it’s not the same.

Her only solace is that every day, before she goes to sleep, she calls Glimmer’s ship and talks to her friends. It’s great to see their faces, but of course it’s not enough. The barrier of the screen and the presence of other people mean that she can’t get the intimacy with Catra that she’s craving.

Still, the calls are something.

Until they stop.

Everyone’s expecting them to stop, it’s not a surprise—they already knew that once the ship got far enough away, they’d lose signal.

It doesn’t make it hurt any less.

Adora takes to eating her meals alone in the gardens of Bright Moon. Most of her friends who live at Bright Moon are currently in space, and she doesn’t want to annoy Netossa and Spinerella by hanging off of them all the time, so she does her best to be content by herself.

One day, maybe a couple of months after losing the ship’s signal, she’s eating there and she remembers the picnic she and Catra had before she’d left.

She cries. She can’t help it.

When she opens her eyes, she almost starts to cry again when she sees the state of the plants around her—they’ve all begun to wilt, going brown around their edge and wrinkling.

Uh oh.

She steels herself. She thinks of better times with Catra, and how much she loves her, and she ignores the endless chasm of space that separates them.

The plants glow and heal. Adora breathes a sigh of relief.

…

Adora throws herself into the reconstruction efforts around Etheria after that. It keeps her mind off how much she misses Catra. She travels to the other kingdoms, using She-Ra as a work horse, and, for a bit, it looks like the whole accidentally-killing-things thing might be a fluke.

…

It isn’t.

Adora keeps working, keeps She-Ra-ing, but eventually, she can’t deny it. The planet is suffering.

Perfuma notices first, unsurprisingly. It isn’t just plants in Bright Moon that are affected, apparently—it seems like they all are.

A meeting of the Princess Alliance is called. They pool all the information they can.

Adora stays quiet during that meeting. She knows that she’s the problem. But if she’s the problem, that means she can fix it herself. She doesn’t need to let anyone know that Etheria’s savior is now slowly killing it.

She can do this. Right?

…

Adora does everything she can think of to make herself happy.

She visits the other princesses for fun instead of just work. She stops by Madame Razz’s cottage more often—it’s very relaxing to spend time with her now that she knows everything, rather than insanely frustrating like it used to be. She even swings by Bow’s dads’ library and helps them look at old First One’s artifacts.

None of it seems to work, at least not permanently. If anything, the hole in her chest grows bigger and bigger every time she catches herself enjoying something—inevitably, she wishes Catra, Glimmer, and Bow were with her to have fun too.

The plants continue to die. Animals start getting affected too—the large, lumbering beasts that had finally been awoken after Prime’s defeat are starting to look more tired and haggard by the day.

Adora wants to cry. But she knows that’ll just make things worse. So she pushes the urge down, she muscles through it, just like she’s done so often in her young life.

…

Even the weather starts to go off-kilter.

It’s been almost a year since Glimmer’s ship left. That’s not surprising—traveling through space takes time, and no one can account for what they might have found out there.

What is surprising is that it’s been six months without rainfall.

It’s worse than surprising, actually. It’s terrifying.

So much of Etheria’s plant life is long dead. The large, grassy fields that had sprouted after Prime’s defeat are now barren wastelands unto themselves. The animals are asleep again, and if just a single spark were to ignite the dried remnants of branches and leaves that litter Etheria—Well. They’d never make it out of a fire.

The other princesses have figured out what’s wrong. It was Scorpia who figured it out first—probably because she was the one who took the most interest in Entrapta’s research.

“I don't think it's just Adora’s life that’s connected to Etheria,” she said, in one of the Alliance’s meetings. “Her emotions are too.”

They don’t know how to help her, though. The ship is still out of range for signaling. They do their best, day by day, to protect their kingdoms and to cheer Adora up, but things steadily get worse and worse.

They start to take shifts monitoring the video messaging software Entrapta had left behind, and they hope the ship gets close soon.

…

Late one night, Perfuma is manning the software, and she gets a ping. She sends a message.

“Please, hurry back as fast as you possibly can. Adora needs you.”

…

As soon as the ship lands, Catra mounts Swift Wind’s back and the pair race back to Bright Moon. Perfuma had filled the four space travelers in while Entrapta throttled the speed as much as she could.

She surveys the sickly ground underneath them. Her chest tightens.

After what feels like an eternity of flying, Swift Wind lands on Adora and Catra’s balcony. Catra pats his flank. “Thank you,” she whispers. He nods and flies away.

Catra opens the door to her room as gently as possible, silently padding over the shining floors.

A head shoots up on the bed—Melog. The cat-creature jumps down and meets Catra halfway, head-butting her and purring affectionately. Catra rubs their ears fondly.

Melog must sense what Catra needs to do. They meow one last time, then vanish.

Catra continues towards the bed. She can make out Adora’s face now—she winces at the harsh, dark circles under her eyes and the sad furrow of her brow.

As gently as she can, she shakes Adora’s shoulder. “Wake up,” she says, the words a low rumble in her throat. “Wake up, sweetheart.”

Adora’s eyes blink open. She yawns, stretches, and goes stiff with shock.

“Catra,” she whispers, like she can’t believe it. “You’re here?”

Catra nods. Something in Adora’s face crumples, and Catra’s heart breaks. She surges forward, wrapping her arms around Adora, and crushes her to her chest. She buries her face in Adora’s hair, breathing in the familiar scent that she’d missed for so long.

Adora makes a quiet, choked sound, and holds Catra in kind.

They sit together in silence for a few moments. Catra rocks them back and forth, so glad to be home, and so sorry she’d left.

Adora begins to shake in her arms.

Catra pulls away, concerned. She brings one of her hands up to brush Adora’s hair out of her eyes and get a good look at her.

Adora is red-faced and trembling, but she makes no sound. Her eyes are wet, but no tears fall. It's like she’s about to rupture. She looks at Catra beseechingly.

Catra kisses her on the forehead. “Let it out, sweetheart. It’s okay. Let it out.”

Adora lets out a sob. And then another. And another. Catra tucks Adora’s head under her chin and rubs her back while she cries.

Outside, thunder crashes. Raindrops pelt the window. Finally. The tension has snapped, and the clouds release everything they’ve been storing up for months.

Dead plants grow and become green. Giant animals blink awake for the first time in months.

And Catra kisses Adora with everything she has. 

**Author's Note:**

> just a little idea that popped into my head one night. let me know what you thought if you'd like!


End file.
